A Political and Ameliorative State of Nature: Miranda Fricker

This chapter reconstructs Miranda Fricker’s genealogy of the virtue of testimonial justice and argues that her politicized state of nature illustrates how reverse-engineering can feed into conceptual engineering. The chapter first examines how she de-idealizes her state-of-nature model just enough to bring social heterogeneity, power-relations, and politics into it, thereby raising the question of how far genealogical models should be de-idealized. Second, it is shown how Fricker’s use of pragmatic genealogy differs from that of the other genealogists in being primarily ameliorative rather than explanatory. While earlier genealogists reverse-engineered the points of practices we already have, Fricker’s genealogy functions as a corrective, indicating respects in which our practices have in fact developed in ways that fall short of satisfying the needs highlighted by her model. It is then argued that making ameliorative use of the method requires pairing genealogy with a theory of error.